About Those Memories……

I had a real dark spot last night, at 3 am. (Thus my haiku Torment.) Betty told me that she began to reconnect with S in February of last year. In February, he had hernia surgery. February 11. Evn though he had done the prison whore only a few weeks before, I ran to his house the night before surgery, and stayed with him. I didn’t want him to go into the hospital having no one. I wanted him to know he wasn’t alone, even though he’d done that to me. He wouldn’t let me go with him. Maybe she was taking him for all I know. He told me his son was, and that a man from work was bringing him home the next day. Maybe it was her too. Maybe that’s why he was so nervous when I got stuck in the snow in his driveway the next morning, because she was coming to get him.

We both always said that was one of our most beautiful nights together.

Afterward, though I realized how hurt I still was over the prison whore. Addison wanted to see only me, and I needed to get away from the drama, so I didn’t see Scott for awhile. Maybe a month. Then I went to Florida, Addie dropped me at the airport in the early morning. But in Florida, all I could think of was Scott. When I saw a dolphin swimming the first person I wanted to tell was him. We began talking. I would walk the beach every day and call him, even though he was at work, he’d take a break. He wanted pics of where I was, so he could imagine. We talked and texted every day.

When I came home 5 days later, Addie was picking me up at the airport, I’d left my car with him. Scott begged me not to let him sleep with me (he was picking me up at midnight), though I knew Addie assumed he would. I said, “we won’t have sex…it will be late.” Scott said, “even sleeping together is intimacy. Please….don’t….”

So when Addie picked me up at midnight I told him that I was going to see Scott the next night, that I felt we had unfinished business and that I didn’t feel right sleeping together until I knew what was going on. And broke Addie’s heart for the first time.

Scott came over the next night, he explained in terms I could understand about the prison whore. I believe still, that that was the truth. And I forgave him. We made up, he said then, that he was no longer going to put a wall up between us, that he was open to whatever happened. He said other things that were all I’d ever dreamed of hearing.

The weeks following were the best of our relationship. He treated me lovingly, sweetly, exactly the way I’d dreamed of all those months. There was no push pull for that brief time. I fell more in love with him than ever, and thought that he was falling too. He said, all the time, how I scared him because he had feelings for me he didn’t expect. He said, “I said I didn’t want to be in love, I didn’t say I wasn’t.”

When his best friend died, he began to withdraw, some 5 or 6 weeks later. I assumed it was grief over losing a friend of 40 years. After I found out about Betty, I always thought that she came back into his life then, she’d known the friend too, and thought that’s when they reconnected.

But in her email, she said how they’d reconnected in February of that year, and how she wished he’d just told her about me, and she would have walked away happy for him.

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night and was thinking about all this, and the time line and realized that if he began seeing her in February, when I was with Addie, that all of that was a lie, all of that tender, honest loving. All the parts I held onto just to convince myself that it was real at some point. I don’t know when she even saw him, I was with him on the weekends, I saw him often during the week too.

But I guess he found the time.

So…those were the thoughts in the dark tormenting me last night. This morning, I accept that there is, was, nothing real about our relationship. That doing prison whore actually marked the end of our relationship. Maybe the night I went to him, before his surgery was real. I hope so. I hope there is something real that I can look back on and isolate as truth from him.

I wish I could say that it doesn’t hurt, but it does. Each revelation comes back to haunt me, that I gave so much to someone who was just playing. It s a picture I don’t want to look at. I told Betty this story. I told her at the time, well, it’s just one more lie on top of a pile of them, I think I’m immune the the pain it causes now. I told her, so she would have the full story too, the one I’m sure he never told her.

I haven’t heard from her since, but I am guessing that they are trying to work it out, I am guessing that my story may have caused her some pain too, even though that was not my intent. I like her, I know she has been just as devastated as me by this man. I am grateful that the communication has stopped between he and I because I just need to get away from it. There’s no healing when he’s lurking on the periphery of my life. I still feel his energy, it’s hard enough as it is. Even if I don’t see him, because I refuse as I did 10 days ago, it’s hard. It all comes flooding back with the sound of his voice.

Morning came, and I feel some distance from it. I think being up in the night and allowing myself to feel the pain, allowed me to get through the pain. Sitting with my sadness. It’s the only way sometimes. I’m not immune to it after all.